UK Guardian: Women of the world unite against Bush!

[T_i_B]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uselections2004/comment/story/0,14259,1176108,00.html

The global gag rule, a Reagan-era policy that Bush reinstated as one of his first actions in office, cuts off US Agency for International Development funds to organisations advocating abortion law reform and promotes abstinence as a preventative strategy against Aids. According to the electronic news service Women's e-news, this has resulted in "closed clinics, cuts in healthcare staff and dwindling medical supplies". The US is the only industrialised country in the world that has not ratified CEDAW, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women.

Gigi Francisco is the south-east Asian regional coordinator for DAWN (Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era), a Southern-based NGO working on the effect of development policies on women. In an interview to be published in a forthcoming book on women's rights, Francisco identifies US unilateralism on issues of international trade and international security as key concerns for women's rights in the next five to ten years.

Meanwhile US women's groups are working to channel women's voting power to send the Republicans out of office. Indeed the woman's vote has been identified by left and right as a prime demographic target.

But in her new book, Bushwomen: Tales of a Cynical Species, journalist and radio host Laura Flanders argues that the Bush team and its prominent women members have undertaken a "cynical crusade to put a female face on anti-feminist policy".

[Hekate]

1. Count me in, sisters!

The SOB reinstated the global gag rule his first full day in the Oval Office. I damn near drove off the side of the on-ramp when that tidbit came on the radio.

Hekate